40% of Syria's children no longer in school

Nearly half of Syria’s school-age children – 2.8 million and counting – cannot get an education because of the devastation and violence from a civil war now entering its fourth year, the UN children’s agency has said.

Most of those – 2.3 million Syrian children who should be in classes – remain within Syria’s borders, as education and health services collapse and classrooms are bombed or used as shelters and military barracks, Unicef said in a new report that shows the tragically expanding effects of a conflict on the region’s youngest victims.

In total, 40% of all school-age children in Syria are out of school, the report said.

Agency officials told reporters in Geneva that another 300,000 Syrian children are out of school in Lebanon, along with some 93,000 in Jordan, 78,000 in Turkey, 26,000 in Iraq and 4,000 in Egypt.

“When one says that it is the worst place to be as a child, in Syria, for now, I would agree,” said Hamida Lasseko, Unicef’s deputy representative in Syria’s capital Damascus. “Children are missing from education, they are out of school. Children have the hidden wounds, and these wounds form scars.”